Prey by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

If Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s interpretation of the statistics is correct, Muslim men in Europe engage in violence against women at far higher rates than do their Christian compatriots. For the purposes of this review, I assume her analysis of the numbers is reasonable, though, surely—and as she emphasizes—better records should be kept by both European governments and by Muslim community agencies. “Prey” explores the origins of this disparity, its effect on Muslim women, its increasing effect on surrounding Christian women, and the complicity of the Christian Left with the offenders. It is heavy on anecdotes, which would be inappropriate for an academic book, but is acceptable (and expected) for a popular one.

Cultural contact is a too-way street: the host influences the newcomer, and also, the newcomer influences the host. Usually, the results of such contact are quite positive for a society, increasing openness, tolerance, and cultural richness. Sometimes though, the results can be negative, especially when anti-social traits of some minority individuals come to permeate the culture at large. This is not a chauvinistic assertion. Rather, it is a simple numbers game: when the minority adversely influences the majority, quite simply, more people are negatively affected, and society as a whole may suffer. And while there is a certain indeterminacy about what counts as a “good” cultural practice versus a “bad,” it is uncontroversial to assert that violence against women is a bad one.

Those who tend to be more open to/susceptible to “exotic” cultures typically coalesce around the political Left; those who tend to be more closed to/resistant to “exotic” cultures, the political Right. And while all cultures possess a complex mix of both positive (more humanistic) and negative (less humanistic) mores, the undiscriminating unwashed, adhering to political orthodoxy rather than intelligence, tends to conflate the good with the bad based on wholly immaterial factors. For the Left, “exotic” is usually good; for the Right, “exotic” is usually bad. Consequently, the Left may uncritically embrace negative (non-humanistic) practices, simply because they are “exotic”; the Right may uncritically reject elements of an “exotic” culture that might improve the commonweal. Both extremes pose threats to open societies. In the Christian world, the aggrandizement of the exotic by the Left, and the disdain of the exotic by the Right, extends especially to the exotic poor, rarely to the exotic privileged. (And as regarding the Jews—be they poor, wealthy, exotic, or assimilated—the Right, the Left, and also the Islamists, wholeheartedly concur.)

Contrary to beliefs of the racist Right, Ayaan Hirsi Ali effortlessly establishes that the out-sized percentage of sex offenders being Muslim men does not have ethnic origins (Christian Arabs integrate quite successfully), nor linguistic (The Chinese integrate successfully, for example), nor due to poverty (The Vietnamese integrate successfully, for example), nor a lack of education (No evidence discussed suggests that immigrants poorly educated in their homelands are any more likely to engage in sexual violence than are better-educated ones). No, it is religious. Of course, not all religions are the same: though adherents of Judaism, when allowed to, thrive in the Christian West, a worryingly high percentage of Muslims do not. So, unless one asserts that there is a special Christian antipathy toward one religion—Islam—that is holding back its adherents (Jews and students of history might disagree...), it seems to be aspects of modern Islam itself, in particular its toxic intertwining of the religious and the political—broadly, clerical fascism; specifically, Islamism—that is the likely culprit. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is at her most compelling when she investigates the mutually reinforcing pressures of political and religious indoctrination that feed sexual violence, and the crucial necessity for societies to unshackle their legal structures from religious doctrine if rates of sexual violence are to be attenuated.

What needs to be considered are not the immutable qualities of person-hood (race, ethnicity, sexual orientation) that bigots—be they Leftist (“identity politics”) or Rightist (“supremacy politics”)—would so blithely propose, but rather, mutable ones: religion, politics. Mutable properties—attitudes certainly, but especially, behaviors—that can and do have deleterious effects on community welfare should be carefully isolated, analyzed, critiqued, repressed (if a behavior), and in a better world, overcome. But this is not how modern European public policy makers are approaching the problem. With Leftism (as opposed to liberalism) today holding sway in Western Europe, policy makers are effectively abandoning the well-being of Muslim women, and, increasingly, are ignoring the threat to—and acquiescence of—the culture at large. When not ignoring the threat, Leftists often hurl outrageous accusations at those who want to address and understand the problem in order to ameliorate it: they are “Islamophobic,” or even “racist”. With Leftists (as opposed to liberals) in control then, the problem of violence against women may become exacerbated, and society’s imbalances—sexual, racial, ethnic, and religious—are bound to increase. This is what Ayaan Hirsi Ali bemoans.

As the risk of societal imbalance comes into view, there likely follows a race to the extremist edges of the socio-political spectrum among opportunistic populist mouthpieces. In the USA, for example, we have “folk heroes” who lock up the innocent wholesale (Joe Arpaio in Arizona), and who free the guilty wholesale (Chesa Boudin in California). We witness the ascension of those who preach and screech their vile mix of religious supremacy, populist race-hatred, and conspiracy theories, some in public office (Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ilhan Omar, for example) some, thus far, out (David Duke and Linda Sarsour, for example). (For her part, Linda Sarsour is on record as wanting to “take away [Ayaan Hirsi Ali]’s vagina" and to have her beaten up; since Linda Sarsour surely knows that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a victim of genital mutilation, she apparently wants, merely, to “finish the job” in good Islamist fashion.) These are not the ways of liberal, enlightened societies, yet these primitive haters are earning enthusiastic support among increasing numbers of unthinking Americans. Incipient acquiescence, Ayaan Hirsi Ali fears, may spiral into to full-on embrace. This is where ignoring violence against women (among other of society’s ills) may lead.

In their home Islamic countries, Muslim women are, perversely, partially protected by the very system that oppresses them: sex apartheid (in varying degrees of severity) limits male-female interaction; women are often cleansed from the public sphere. In their new European homes, this system, of course, is not in place: streets are sullied with the scent and the skin of the female sex; the rule of liberal law prevails. And so, somewhat akin to a species being introduced into a new ecosystem, the environment can be thrown into a state of imbalance: some Muslim men, wholly unpracticed in the mere visuals of an open society, will act out with impunity. Out of fear, innocents might self-impose restrictions on their hard-earned liberties, the state may follow suit with further restrictions, and the liberal state may slowly transmogrify into the police state. Scenarios such are these are, according the author, playing out in Europe today. Ayaan Hirsi Ali suggests that Europe is risking its liberal foundations unless it enforces its own laws on its own people, old and new alike.

	How To Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Bari Weiss's “How to Fight Anti-Semitism” is a very useful book, mostly because it provides great comfort to those, such as me, who feel so similarly—and equally passionately—about Jew-hatred.

Its usefulness to certain others may be a different story, however. Although couched as both a guide for the perplexed and also as a warning to those who might be swayed into racist conformity, in one sense, at least, it succeeds too well, by preemptively demonstrating the bigotry of some Weiss might be hoping to reach: Leftists. Leftists actually believe they work for the common good, not just for their own selfish ends. They are deluded, of course, as their hatred of the Jews and their state so shrilly demonstrates. Bigots are unreasonable people, and so here’s the main point: one cannot reason with unreasonable people. It’s much the same as trying to employ reason with religious fundamentalists. It just won’t work. And speaking of religious fundamentalists, at least they do not delude themselves (in the relevant way, at least): they are proud of their hate for everyone but themselves. Leftists claim to be the voice of the downtrodden "other", but really, they speak only for their "others"-of-choice: No Jews Allowed.

So, while reaching Rightists and Islamists is clearly not her goal—they are far beyond the pale, far beyond her reach—in the end, dialogue with Leftists is comparably futile. Indeed, it’s the combination of their delusional hypocrisy and their betrayal of liberalism that triggers my special infuriation and outrage towards them. Put another way, while Rightist and Islamist Jew-haters are guilty of blind hate, Leftist Jew-haters are guilty of double-blind hate (to reconfigure a term): they hate blindly, but also, they are blind to their hate. Perhaps Weiss feel a sense of righteous indignation at the laughably predictable response her book has received from the regressive Left, though it’s hardly the case that they’ve fallen into a trap she set for them. She laid no trap: she establishes with crystal-clarity that they are Jew-haters, and they simply reacted as the Jew-haters they are. Nothing to see here, folks.

Leftists are so blinded by doctrine that Weiss's words passed right through them and into the ether. They accuse her of Islamophobia despite her making it perfectly clear that she abhors it. They accuse her of illiberalism despite each and every one of her arguments and assertions being grounded in the liberal values that they falsely claim to hold so dear. They accuse her of cozying up to conservatives despite her emphatic condemnation of conservative ideology and its adherents. These are the blind reactions of ideological fundamentalists, so very similar in their stupidity, their irrationality, their arrogance, and their hate, to their religious bedfellows.

Israel is an oasis of liberal democracy—a country for all its citizens—in a desert of clerical ethno-fascism. It is the culmination of the national liberation movement of an ethnic minority humiliated, raped, murdered, slaughtered en masse for millenia, returning to its tiny sliver of a homeland to finally, finally, live in freedom and dignity. This minuscule, white-minority country (non-white, in truth; I don't consider Ashkenazim white)—itself an ethnic minority enclave in a grand (and ever-grander) sprawl of ethno-religious conformity—withstands interminable attacks by the governments of its region’s majority population, whose stated goal is to ethnically cleanse the land in order to expand its fascist hegemony.

And the Left is dead against it. Why? Because this tiny beleaguered minority happens to be “the Jews”. Quite inevitably, Leftists have embraced the Christian doctrine of their forebears through and through; they are just another gang of marauding Christian crusaders. Ultimately, despite Weiss's well-crafted tripartite discussion, there is little motivation to distinguish among Leftist Jew-hatred, Rightist Jew-hatred (collectively, Christianist Jew-hatred), and Islamist Jew-hatred, as all Jew-haters drink from the same poisoned well.

Meanwhile, it doesn’t help that the Jewish struggle for national liberation has been so successful. The Christianists' relevant Manichaeanism of choice is that Jews must remain powerless. This manifests itself on the Left as (inter alia) a denial of their right to live in their tiny homeland in freedom and dignity, so it’s high time they be put back in their place (Figuratively, of course: Jews' real place is in Israel, and anywhere else they may choose to live). Indeed, after that ever-so-brief respite Western Jews enjoyed in the post-Holocaust era (in retrospect, not due to feelings of guilt or shame, or the sudden enlightenment of the perpetrating civilization, but rather, due to a Christianist hudna), things are finally getting back to normal. Truly, the post-Holocaust Left abandoned liberalism on June 10, 1967.

And to those few Jews in the USA who have jumped on the haters’ bandwagon out of a combination of stupidity and fear (Stockholm Syndrome), I ask this: If things get as bad here as they are getting on the continent, or would have gotten (and may still get) in the U.K., would you jeopardize your life and the lives of your loved ones by staying put, rather than seek safety in Israel? If you are outraged by the presence of a well-armed Jewish minority in the Middle East, are you similarly outraged by the presence of armed guards at Jewish institutions in the Diaspora—synagogues, schools, agencies, museums, day care centers, etc.—who protect the lives of you and/or your loved ones?

As a lifelong American Liberal, it is quite remarkable that I must come to this conclusion about this brave new world of extremist hate we live in: How to fight antisemitism? With the IDF.

Foreskin's Lament by Shalom Auslander

"Grow up, gever!”: a pan

As a foul-mouthed atheistic ranter, one who grew up just down 59 from Shalom Auslander, one who vividly remembers Rickels and Spencers and Waldens, one who is very much in two minds about circumcision (though one who was raised Conservative rather than Charedi), I had high hopes for what turns out to be this clumsily-written poor-Johnny-one-note rant against, well, against everything, but especially against religious observance and the author's dysfunctional family; a screed bereft of nuance, depth, insight, or clever humor. I could see, maybe, writing a forgettable essay for an online Jewish magazine along these lines, but a whole book of this headache-inducing me!-me!-me! automyographical guff? Neyn a dank.

Some examples (among scads) of its amateur-hour prose:

Chapter Seven: After starting a new school, and, despite his prepubescence, getting all horny for some of the girls, he projects his lust onto a photo of an Asian woman’s “honeypot,” as it’s described in some porn he discovers in the woods. He links this to the honey he’ll be having on Rosh Hashanah, coming up in a few weeks. Wait, he’d already been in school for a while, and Rosh Hashanah is still a few weeks away? Shortly thereafter he’s dancing in the hallway one night, celebrating having just evaded his father’s wrath, but scurries back to bed because the night is too cold. Too cold? How much time has passed such that we’re now in the dead of winter? Then, a few pages later, we’re back in the warm weather, since he writes that on one Friday afternoon (just before Shabbos) it would be “a good couple of hours” before anyone got home. Flip a page or two, and—after this prepubescent boy wanks to climax—the night is cold again. Next page? “An unusually hot day.” Please.

Page 116: “Leon was a year older than I.”
Page 122: “Leon was one year older than me.”

Page 166-7 “I had just put my yarmulke back on and José, a jolly, heavyset, middle-aged Hispanic man, was sitting with some friends on the stoop of a dilapidated old brownstone.” […] “—Come here, said José. He gave me a dime bag, and told me it was on the house. —Name’s Jose.” Look, it’s not rocket science. All he had to do was not prematurely supply his readers with José’s name—twice!—before this stranger José actually introduces himself to him, and this might have been an intelligible vignette, instead of the incoherent mess that it is.

Page 172: After writing that one of his car’s hidden headlights wouldn’t open, he offers, “My car looked like Moshe Dayan, the eye-patched Israeli minister of defense.” When writers feel the need to explain their oh-so-obvious (so-called) jokes, you know they are in deep deep shit, shit that the thoughtful reader is, quite understandably, loath to muck around in.

Page 285: “I discovered that even Frasier Crane circumcised his son (season 8, episode 167), and he was married to a non-Jew.” Where to begin? (1) The series in question is Cheers (not Frasier, as is sloppily implied). (2) The episode was number 176 (not 167; should Auslander add dyslexia to his Periodic Table of Ailments?). (3) Frasier’s wife was a Jew (not a non-Jew). One sentence. Twenty words. Three strikes. You’re out, dude.

Page 293: He names his son “Paix”: “It means ‘peace,’ Like my name, but without the God bit...” he nastily explains to his mom. What “God bit” is that? “Shalom” means “peace”; it’s derived from the triliteral root sh-l-m, related to “well-being,” and it’s completely devoid of divinity. Guy’s an idiot.

Page 294: Regarding a bris, “…[T]he God-fearing, Torah-observant Jew needs to place his lips upon the wound, and suck blood from it…”. The ancient, bizarre, risky, and near-universally shamed metzitzah b’peh is thankfully dying out; it doesn’t “need” to be done, not by any stretch. Foreskin aside, I just hope little Paixele survives his bitter, deranged and—let’s face it—none-too-bright father, with his mental health intact.

This is all just bad, bad writing, as Leonard Pinth-Garnell might say, and on multiple levels, too.

Like the Suburban Homeboy he aspires to be, Auslander thinks he is shocking his readers with his endless “Fuck God!”s, his mother’s vibrator, his characterizing Crime and Punishment as “funny,” his eating milchigs shortly after fleishigs. (Just check out that scandalous title he picked—Shock! Horror!—cribbed from a hit New Zealand play from 1981.) He’s not. He’s just boring them to tears.

Look, I get it. Maybe this is all just a bottomless cholent of foggy memory and bitter anger and grand fantasy, but even so, if a supposed memoir doesn’t possess a modicum of both internal and external consistency, if it rides roughshod over conventions of grammar and punctuation, if it never offers even a single reflective insight (why does he still believe in God, for example), if it doesn’t leaven its nastiness with at least one or two elements that intermittently render its protagonist sympathetic instead of solely hateful, and if it isn’t even funny (try though the author might), then it is meaningless, it is insulting, and it is most of all boring. Auslander doesn’t care, of course; his disdain for his readers is too blind and too obvious, and his talent is too limited.

Gee Officer Auslander, sure, Krup God, but Krup you more.

REVIEWS BY JAMIE REINSTEIN

Conditional Citizens by Laila Lalami

Raised in Morocco, Schooled in American Identity Politics

As a longtime teacher of students from immigrant families and a fan of Moroccan-born, American-educated Laila Lalami’s deftly written, nuanced fiction, I was looking forward to reading her new memoir Conditional Citizens. Yet, not more than a few pages in, I realized that the book I was holding in my hands was little more than a standard woke polemic. Lalami exploits her status as “an Arab, an immigrant, and a Muslim” to produce a paint-by-numbers exercise in 21st century identity politics. Still, she wouldn’t be the first gifted literary stylist to morph into a pamphleteer when trying their hands at social or political commentary.

Yes, our country’s founders were flawed human beings. Yes, racism still exists in many facets of American society, Yes, Donald Trump is a con man and a would-be dictator. Lalami brings nothing new to the table by harping on these well-known truths, and most of her book is facile and disingenuous—not to mention anti-Semitic. Nevertheless, the only criticism I could find was on conservative media outlets like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, whose Tunku Varadarajan writes in his review of Conditional Citizens, “Ms. Lalami is unwilling to recognize that any racial and social progress has occurred in America since the days of the Founding Fathers”.

A quick look at the quotes on the back cover is revealing. “Conditional Citizens is a blitz on the ways the nation titillates and injures its most vulnerable,” gushes Kiese Laymon incoherently. “Laila Lalami has written with such sharp clarity and illuminating insight that reading this book was like encountering America for the first time,” adds Maaza Mengiste, emerging from under a rock. Across the media landscape, reviewers all fall in line, heaping praise on a book that offers precious little in terms of original analysis.

Right off the bat, Lalami paints Barack Obama, who had to contend with conspiracy theories about his place of birth and ludicrous allegations that he was a closeted Muslim, as a victim of the white supremacy she finds so pervasive throughout American society. To buttress her argument, she cites widely circulated comments made at a town hall in 2008 by presidential candidate John McCain. After being told by a Minnesota woman that she couldn’t trust Obama, whom she believed to be “an Arab”, McCain cut her off mid-sentence. “No ma’am,” McCain told her. “He's a decent family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.” Not good enough for Lalami. With twisted logic, she infers that McCain was agreeing with the woman that Arabs couldn’t be American citizens—more proof of her central claim that “people of color” have always been considered “conditional citizens”.

We all remember that during his candidacy, Obama was forced to disavow several public figures he had associated with. About this controversy, Lalami writes:

“He had to prove his Americanness by showing his birth certificate; publicly declaring his Christianity; distancing himself from Rashid Khalidi, the Columbia professor and advocate for Palestinian rights; and denouncing Jeremiah Wright, the pastor who in the wake of 9/11 had sharply criticized U.S. foreign policy and its blowback effects. Obama went to great lengths to show his love—and gratitude—for the U.S.”

Lalami fails to mention Rashid Khalidi’s radio interview prior to Trump’s inauguration, in which, referring to Jews in the United States and Israel, he said, “Unfortunately, these people infest the Trump transition team; these people are going to infest our government as of January 20.” And who can forget Jeremiah Wright, who declared, “The state of Israel is an illegal, genocidal place…” and addressed Obama’s eventual disavowal of him by defiantly gloating, "Them Jews ain't going to let him talk to me,"

In addition to ignoring anti-Semitism, Lalami engages in glaring false equivalencies to advance her thesis that “whiteness” is synonymous with oppression. In a chapter called “Borders”, she writes about various walls in different parts of the world and expresses justifiable outrage at Trump’s proposed border wall with Mexico. However, the fact that walls throughout history have been built for different purposes and to varying degrees of effectiveness seems to elude her. “There in the birthplace of a man who preached about loving your neighbor as you love yourself,” Lalami writes, remembering a visit to Bethlehem in the Palestinian territories, “I stood in line at a checkpoint, walked through a narrow metal cage, and waited to be searched by Israeli guards with semi-automatic weapons casually slung across their shoulders.” Of course, in Lalami’s binary world, Israelis are to be vilified as “white” while Palestinians are to be celebrated as “people of color”. Yet, unlike Trump’s wall, promoted for the sole purpose of ginning up his base by stoking fears of nonexistent “criminals” and “rapists”, the wall built by the Israeli government has been effective against a real enemy—suicide bombers. By all accounts, the wall has reduced terrorist attacks in Israel, and for that reason, it remains enormously popular in the country today.

Throughout the book, Lalami remains fixated on “color”, at one point lamenting how (like everybody else) she has had to fill out forms that require her to pick from a selection of arbitrary racial categories. Sensing an opportunity, the fair-skinned Lalami takes things one step further, complaining that though Arabs are generally obliged to identify themselves as “white”, her true color is in fact “brown”. Of course, this label offers her the opportunity to claim the victimhood that is so desirable in her struggle against the perceived monolithic racial hierarchy that keeps a stranglehold on American society.

Lalami is even bold enough to obliquely use her own young daughter to advance her political agenda. After describing how some narrow-minded Americans discriminate against immigrants who speak their native languages in public, she brandishes an anecdote about her daughter to indict the hegemony of “whiteness” in America. Lalami relates how she and her husband decided to return to her native Morocco for a year when her daughter was three years old so that Lalami could pursue research and her daughter could pick up the native language of her mother’s family. “By the time we returned to California,” Lalami writes, “she was fluent in Arabic”. She continues:

“On her first playdate with a friend from her new school in Los Angeles, I watched her try to teach him the word for apple: tuffaaha. But within weeks, she stopped speaking Arabic. It didn’t matter what I tried, she wanted to speak English, like everyone else at her preschool. Even at four years old, she had somehow understood that the use of a different language in public space was a negative marker of difference, and she decided to give it up in order to feel a greater sense of belonging.”

What if things had been reversed and Lalami’s daughter had spent her first three years in Morocco speaking Arabic, spent a year in the U.S. learning English, and then returned to Morocco? Would she have kept speaking English even though everyone around her was speaking Arabic? Hard to believe that Lalami holds a doctorate in linguistics!

The book concludes with a chapter called “Inheritance”, focusing on the subjugation of women. Paradoxically, the whole chapter seems out of place in a book that is ostensibly about how white people discriminate against everybody else. Perhaps Lalami figured that while she was at it, she might as well throw one more category of victimhood into the mix. Most of the chapter consists of a rehashing of the Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings—for the benefit of readers who must not pay much attention to either news or politics. She also spins two tales of her own experiences with sexual harassment in both Los Angeles and Casablanca. But wait, if this sort of thing happens in Morocco too, what is her point?

I am not a conservative by any stretch of the imagination. As a college kid in the 80s, I demonstrated against apartheid and nuclear weapons—and in support of the Equal Rights Amendment. At my graduation, I joined like-minded students scattered throughout the audience in standing up and turning my back to the stage when Donald Regan, the White House Chief of Staff under Ronald Reagan, delivered the commencement address. My outlook hasn’t changed a bit since those days, but something around me has undergone a tectonic shift. When a champion of free speech and women’s rights like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who lamented the tragic consequences of the failure of Muslim immigrants to assimilate in the Netherlands in her captivating book Infidel, is vilified by those in Lalami’s camp, isn’t it time to push back against the mind-numbing leftist orthodoxy that prohibits a clear-eyed examination of issues?